Uh-oh She’s Confused Again
At the request of more than one reader, I spent part of my Sunday trying to figure out something. The something was exactly why the article about Link Leak submitted to Wikipedia was not there. The article, written by journalist Martin Neumann about the Link Leak Project named by Mike Sigers, was taken down within minutes of when it was posted at Wikipedia — the free online encyclopedia.
I figured this quest to find out the exact reason would be an easy endeavor. Off I went to the Wikipedia home page.
I found out many things. I found out many, many things. I found out so many things, that I could not find my way back through the last things I found out to the first things I found, and consequently twice several times I had to start all over again. Wikipedia’s guidelines are a labyrinthine abyss of information sorely in need of an editor. The guidelines are indeed an encylopedia on their own.
This is the page on undeleting an entry.
I might mention that I have an above average IQ and more patience with print than most folks do, but I gave up then. I made one more try and then did the Liz thing . . .
The Five Pillars of Wikipedia
Five pillars? The Jesuits only have four pillars as far as I recall. An encyclopedia with five pillars? Okay, I’ll go with that. The five pillars are . . . I can’t tell you. When I went back to find them, I couldn’t. I did a search and found the Five Pillars of Islam though.
It was at this point, I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere fast. I don’t like researching in circles much, and I really don’t like information that doesn’t give me answers when I need them.
Email was my next resort. This is what the email said. It also included the permalink for this post.
Hi!
I’ve spent the last two hours on your site and quite frankly, I’m frustrated with your navigation. All I want is a simple answer. Could you answer this question for my readers please? Why was the following article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_leak
deleted within minutes of it’s posting at Wikipedia? To help you out, it was posted at approximately 8:20a.m. Central Time US on Saturday, May 6th.
We at Successful Blog would like to learn from this experience and are waiting at this post [permalink for this post was here] for an answer.
Thanks in advance for the time it takes you to investigate this matter.
—
Smiles,
Liz Strauss
Successful Blog
Of course the Liz thing was a friendly email. I am the nice one.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Related articles
Link Leak Epidemic Spreads Powerful Link Love
The comments where the link is announced
We humble readers await their response.
I hope that they appreciate that we sent the nice one in first.
The lesser nice of us await your bidding.
Thanks for trying to figure out their arcane, inane, insane, lame navigation.
Hey There!
Did you click through to that page? You can tell why I don’t call myself an editor. . . . 🙂
Wikipedia editors are fun. Just because I revel in subversive activities I make sure any pranks that have been done too celebrities that make them look stupid are noted in their Wikipedia entry. These are usually removed within hours, classed as vandalism or made up. Even though I always make sure they are accompanied by supporting evidence through a legitimate article. I really thought open source would allow the world to avoid spin. I’ve given up long ago.
Open Source really means that the ones who want to be on the committee get to pick. . . and we all know what committee people are like.
I looked in the deletion log and it says an editor called InShaneee deleted it, with a reason of ‘nonsense’.
I looked at the overall deletion log and it looks like InShaneee thinks lots of things are nonsense, and deletes things on those grounds quite a bit.
Maybe just recreate it and try again? Perhaps at a different time of day when InShaneee might be sleeping? 😉
Thank you, Lea.
It’s nice to have an answer so quickly, and one with another route is even better. 🙂
That makes sense. I’ve actually avoided committees, teams and groups my entire life so I don’t actually know but I’ve heard I’m backing a good thing.
Maybe a name like InShanee is the reason…with a name like that how could you tell chicken s**t from chicken soup ?
Yeah Anthony,
We loners, we’re a unique breed.
Well, Mike, I think we have an answer, all right,
You spelled it out pretty well. I think.
Well thank you Liz for asking the question of Shitipedia, I mean Wikipedia in your nice way … before, as Mike said, us less nice ones take a virtual baseball bat to them.
“Nonsense” eh! An editor named “InShaneee”, Ha! Seems the power of the editorial hand is getting to their heads just a tad.
Oh well, you live and learn everyday. And here I thought good of Wikipedia.
I harp on more about it at The Leak Project page.
Keenly awating a response fro your email.
I think there are a lot of positives about wikipedia and I use it as a source of information but I bowed out of participating because it would end up being too painful. At a guess, the editor’s reason for deleting your article was that it was deemed (rightly or wrongly) to be commercial in nature.
No matter what you post on Wikipedia, someone will disagree. There will be edits you don’t agree with and deletions you don’t agree with. Maybe I’m a wuss but it didn’t seem worth fighting about. I pick my fights carefully so the return is equal to or greater than the effort. Being an editor in wikipedia seems to devolve too often into fights with no positive returns.
Hi Martin,
I read your link and your comment. I think you have summed up the situation fully and well. That’s the problem with such human-run projects. Humans run them. Show me in any intellectual property agreement where it says the choices will be “good ones.” You can’t.
I think that comment from Lea was the response to my email.
Liz
Hi, Mr. Angry.
Lea is from Wkipedia, and nonsense is the word the editor chose . . . writing about sharing links hardly seems commercialy to me.
I’ve worked with editors for a very long time. There seems to be a tendency in the nature of the folks who choose to take on such work, particularly as a avocation to stick too tightly to their own rules and even to make up a few new ones. Policy is often a BIG word in the editorial world. I think that is the part that chafes here.
Liz
Oh dear! No, I’m not from Wikipedia – I just have done the very occasional edit (I have better ways to spend my time) and have some idea how it works.
Actually, I wouldn’t expect a response (but my experience has been soured by DMOZ – it makes a girl cynical) but who knows, you might get lucky.
Sorry, Lea. *She says with a knowing blush*
No harm intended. Thank you for following this thread and for going the extra step to find the answer for us last night. You’re a good one. I had thought perhaps you might be the fluke.
Publishing is the reason I’ve not volunteered for any role in any of them. I didn’t really expect an answer. Thank you for looking it up for us, again.
Liz
Well I wouldn’t want you to think you had the Authoritative Word from little old *me* 😉
No problemo 🙂
Hey Lea,
And I wouldn’t want you to think . . . that I thought . . . well, you know 🙂
Umm, actually, you ran into two different policy guidelines at once.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary and
Entries should not include original research or neologisms
What you should do instead:
Put it in the Wikionary as a definition, and then wait a month. After that month has passed, try writing a “History of the Link Leak Project” article for Wikipedia.
I think that on balance, you’d want to have the definition of Link Leak in the dictionary anyway – but the editor deserves a sound smacking for not following the wikipedia guidelines on deletions that should be trans-wikied; namely moving the entry to the correct place and using a soft redirect to notify wisitors that the article has been moved.
Hi A.L.
You seem to know your way around the Wiki-whatever. No wonder you’re the Advice Librarian. Thanks for the clarification.
I just check my email and the Wiki-EDITOR answered 7 hours ago with
“Give me just a few minutes and I will have an answer for you!”
Too funny. He must be lost in maze. Hope someone finds him.
You mean there’s a wiki dictionary too ?!
Way too much for me to handle and way too much power handed off to way too __________ ( insert your favorite catchall phrase here ) a human being.
Breathe, Mike, breathe.
There is life after Wikipedia. Honest. 🙂
Heh, yes, there’s a wiki for everyhing, it seems. And really, I don’t see that there’s much of any power involved here – you can recreate the deleted page as long as you’ve got the text saved somewhere on your computer. But I think you really should look at the wictionary first, since Link Leak is a neologism more than anything.
It’s mostly a question of finding the right place to start – get it into the wictionary first, then do a writeup on wikipedia to do an encyclopedic definition of the neologism – there, it can be natural to point to usage examples, history, and so on.
Another alternative is to find the blogopedia and get an entry there – like I said, there’s wikis for everything.
Oh, and the definition of Open source is- there is no committe. You can do whatever you want with anything open source, and if you distribute your work and other people find it useful they’ll pick it up. There are committes for specific distributions or implementations of a particular idea, but if you don’t agree with them, you’re free to “fork” the project and start your own. That’s why we have a couple dozen different major distributions of the Linux operating system – somebody wanted to do something different, and went out and did it. By the same token, you’re free to start your own fork of the Wikipedia project if you don’t agree with what’s currently being done.
AL.
You are so fabulous at what you do, and so patient too. I don’t know why you put up with us. 🙂
I love the information you bring to the dialogue. Every comment is like a new post here.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Liz
Without Wikipedia’s sacred endorsement, how can the LLV survive :)? Nah, it’ll do fine – Wikipedia or not, bloggers will take a liking to it, I think.
Hey Easton,
I’m just worried about the editor who’s missing now for some — what? 9 hours — time. Hope he’s not lost forever in the maze of policies and red tape. Maybe time stands still in there.
Got an answer for you all, and a criterion to go on as well.
I just asked in the right place – now, the next step is.. well, read the comments and see.
After reading that … well
… it’s Goodbye and good luck to Wikipedia. You’ve lost me completely with all this BS.
I guess the editorial powers that be over there have Endorse (the) deletion.
Some “editorial” reasonings really get me pissed off…
Google returns a grand total of 269 unique hits, most of which are either blogs (which do not meet the requirements for reliable sources) or are non-relevant
Fellow bloggers, in Wikipedia’s eyes, we are non-relevant and not a reliable source.
Another …
Unsourced, clearly unimportant
As Easton said, we can do without Wikipedia’s endorsement.
And in my blogger eye, Wikipedia is no longer of relevance. In fact Wikipedia sucks! Google that and you’ll see.
There’s even an entry in Wikipedia called … Wikipedia Sucks. Yep, no arguments here. : -)
At least we learned something from all our endeavors: Wikipedia is being run by zealot editors in a closed shop environment.
Let’s carry on with our Link Leak push.
I still think they are way too power drunk to do a good job.
That happens to geeks and nerds who finally don’t get slapped for opening their yaps.
Shoulda never let the geeks and nerds in the dang room !
See what happens when an anonymous ass gets to exert some sembalnce of power. Kinda like us bloggers !
Thank you Advice Librarian. I could hardly stand the patience it took to read through the conversation about the whole thing. You are a brave and generous soul.
Ah Martin,
We aren’t surprised are we that a group who makes such a place would be so policy bound. Are we?
We suspected all along. 🙂
As you said on with the the fight.
Mike,
You kind of have it right. Give us all a little power and put us in a group of like souls and we take ourselves too seriously. It’s human nature. We humans are a strange species to say the least.
Ah, don’t diss geeks – I am one 🙂
And the first entry agreed with my assesment – Link Leak is a neologism that should be entered into the Wiktionary first. In addition, Rossami was concerned about the copyright issues, specifically that Martin may not have authorised the entry “it is clearly a copyright violation of this site (or if it was dual-licensed, the permission was never documented)” – Wikipedians don’t want to infringe on your copyright. On balance, I think that’s a good thing for you as a writer, eh?
There’s the issue of what counts as a reliable online source ,Wikipedia tries to stick to the academic criteria that other encyclopedias use.
So I say again – put it in the dictionary, spread the Link Leak virus, and get the New York Times or Newsweek to write about you. Both because you want the NYT publicity, and because they count as reliable sources…
It’s mostly a matter of starting in the right end of things, and the Wiktionary is the right place to start 🙂
Advice Librarian – your help and explanation in this matter has been very useful, thank you … but I’m washing my hands of Wikipedia. I have better things to do.
This thing about having to get it into NYT or BusinessWeek before Wikipedia even looks at you is (insert whatever you want here!!!).
Anybody else want to bother going through the bureaucratic rubbish at Wikipedia knock yourselves out – it’s all yours.
Like some of the idiotic editorial reasonings: we’ve got only 269 google hits and under 1000 hits … I’ll simply carry on with Link Leak and BlogTipping and watch how quickly a few zeros are added to those numbers.
You think I’m being harsh on them, read the
Link Leak Deletion Review and you’ll see why I think this way.
Remember folks, the editorial elite at Wikipedia don’t think highly of us bloggers. It goes both way.
Nah, it’s not that the wiki editors don’t think much of bloggers, it’s that wikipedia tries to adhere to academic standards of verifiability and copyright – Rossami thought the article as posted looked like it was in violation of your copyright on the whole link leak thing. As far as I’m concerned, them trying to avoid copyright violations is a good thing.
Wikipedia editors generally try to stick to the standards of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the rest of the print encyclopedias – and if you get a couple more orders of magnitude on the google results page, the editors should agree that it’s a important blogger term 🙂
Thing is, encyclopedias try not to be innovative, that’s not their job. They leave that to the bloggers – and report on the result…
Naturally, I’m somewhere in the middle. . . . I know too many editors and how tightly they interpret policy and having read the deletion discussion, it did seem that policy is the most important thing. People who adhere to policy often make short-sighted decisions, whether they work in banks, hotels, or Wikipedias.
I hear what you are saying Advice Librarian.You carry the spirit and the dream of what the Wikipedia is trying to be. I’m not sure I agree on your examples of reliable sources — especially when it comes to reporting on the Internet–but that’s a detail.
I know that those who work on the Wikipedia have good intentions, but they sure seem to be sorting trees in order to be a wanna be Enclopedia forest.
Publishing is hard enough without a Publisher. I think that is the problem with open source. You can’t build a solid budget by committee. Nor can you build a solid published product. Some ONE has to see to a consist and SIMPLE vision. That can’t happen when there are too many views.
All in all, though A. L. Wikipedia should “hire” you to give tours and tutorials. You’re the best thing they have going for them. 🙂
Martin,
You’re right. We’ll do fine without it. I’m sorry that you’re fine gesture as a reporter was handled so poorly. We learned a LOT through this experience. And confirmed a bit about what we might have suspected.
Wikipedia wants to see themselves as MSM — they identify with print encyclopedias. So why shouldn’t they see bloggers as the MSM does?
Nothing here is worth losing sleep over. We know what we know and no one else can take that from us.
We have made a fine friend in our Advice Librarian. That is a golden gift that came from this.
YEA! and amen.
*blushes*
Thanks, Liz! I do try – and on that note, I added a category to my blog today called Ask the Librarian – mostly for site visitors who didn’t find an article that answered their questions, but I’m open for anyone’s questions – because right now, I think you’re one of the few people who read my blog 🙂
If that takes off, the article direcctory might become an adjunct to the blog, but whatever works, eh? I’m still experimenting, as you probably saw from the “What I learned from Liz” post 🙂
Liz,
No need to be sorry. it was my first foray into Wikipedia and as you said, we learnt alot.
I came at it with a clear mind – no pre-conceived ideas on Wikipedia. Sadly, i’m leaving it differently.
The “non-relevant” and “unreliable” and the google numbers thing was a real eye-opener and really disappointing.
I guess we’re all too spoilt with this web2.0/new media thing where the individual is in charge. So coming up againts such arcane policy and review-decisions-by-committee was a good old look at the old days … only a few years back.
But you know me, Liz, The Link Leak Project was more fun than serious. As long as it spreads we all win.
Hey Advice Librarian,
I think a lot of folks will figure out from this post, just how useful your advice can be. You’re a real source and lots of college kids read this blog.
I’m with you on that one, Martin.
As long as we in the MIddle keep linking, we all win. That was the point after all — to get us all more connected and we seem to be all walking in the same direction a lot more than we were.
Nothing like a common cause.
The way to defend it is probably to go to Wikipediaââ¬â¢s deleted articlesââ¬â¢ page where the editors discuss all that stuff, and state your position. Unfortunately, I donââ¬â¢t think these folks will reply to Lizââ¬â¢s original email. The culture at Wikipedia seems to be that of old media, rather than new mediaââ¬âIââ¬â¢m not saying they have it wrong, but from what I have witnessed, they are very cautious and, for better or for worse, Google references do seem to be one of their tests.
Hi Jack,
Welcome. Thanks for the advice. Yeah. We’ve done that. Some really convoluted conversation on that page about the article. Most of it policy based and not much even near what might be considered agreement.
The link and deletion review is in the comment a few up at 3:02 a.m. this morning. We’re a busy bunch. 🙂
Welcome to the ongoing discussion.
smiles,
Liz
Cas,
I’m coming over to read that article for sure.
Liz